


trade all my tomorrows

by tombenough_and_continent



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 10:36:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18408896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tombenough_and_continent/pseuds/tombenough_and_continent
Summary: Forty-five years, Five learns, is a very long time.





	trade all my tomorrows

**Author's Note:**

> so who do I have to pay to make a Fall Out Boy TUA vid

_If Heaven’s grief_  
_brings Hell’s rain,_  
_then I’d trade all my tomorrows_  
_for just one yesterday._

  
\- “Just One Yesterday,” Fall Out Boy

——————

 

 

The first person he calls for just after he arrives in the apocalyptic future, out of breath and running, is —

 

“Vanya!”

 

Vanya, who had shaken her head at him just moments before. Vanya, fierce and feisty, but recently turned quiet and pensive. Vanya, who always listened.

 

The only answer is the crackling of flame and the snap of hot air, billowing towards a troubled, clouded sky.

 

——————

 

It had never occurred to him, as a brash, cocky thirteen-year-old, that jumping _backwards_ in time would be any harder than jumping _forwards_.

 

Stupid.

 

——————

 

He travels light and swift that first year, carrying everything he needs in a backpack, stuffed with survival essentials and whatever food he’s been able to scrounge. He keeps the newspaper he found rolled up and tucked into the side pocket, and keeps track of the days with tally marks in the margins.

 

He travels through the mornings, covering as much ground as he can. Once the sun has tipped past its noonday point — Five keeps an eye on which way the shadows fall to estimate the hour — he sets his things down and makes up camp. Afternoons are spent practicing, first little jumps in space to warm up, then always, always the attempts to force his way backwards in time.

 

He tries everything he can think of. He hurls the full force of his body and mind against an invisible temporal barrier, fists his hands and shoves at light and digs in his fingernails until small crescent-moon welts appear in his palms. He paces around his campsites and visualizes how they would look covered in snow, fairy lights strung up in the trees, adding detail to a past version of a place until it feels so vivid that he’s sure it’s a memory, sure that if he closes his eyes and steps forward, his foot will land with a crunch of ice crystals—

 

— but nothing works — not force, not technique, not speed, not visualization. Five lies on his back one day and just stares up at the haze that shrouds the sun, drifting in and out of a dream-like trance as his eyes pick out the layers of shadow and texture in a flat gray sky. He thinks about his powers, and for the first time, wishes he weren’t so incandescently talented with them. He’s been able to spatial-jump as long as he can remember, the movement intuitive and unconscious as walking, but it makes trying to figure out what he does and exactly how he does it that much harder. It’s like trying to decode the mechanics of breathing, or blinking, trying to get in between the unconscious deployment of the skill and the conscious registration of its occurrence.

 

The whole process reminds him of training sessions with his father, the cavernous echoing foyer, the black and white checkerboard tiles he was supposed to teleport to and from, and Hargreeves’ voice, ever disapproving, saying _more precision, Number Five, you must have complete control of where you leave space and how you re-enter it —_

 

It gives him a headache, is what it really does, but every time he thinks about giving up he kicks the nearest rock as hard as he can, and the pain reminds him that he’s trying to escape from this place, this post-apocalyptic solitary confinement, that giving in would be tantamount to an admission to defeat, an admission that his father was right, that he wasn’t ready, that he could never be enough on his own. He finds a different spot to sit and faces the desolate wasteland from a different angle, since the previous one obviously wasn’t working for him, and tries tackling it again.

 

——————

 

For his first few missions, the Commission assigns him a partner to work with. He tolerates some of them, ignores most of them, and only tries to actively kill one of them.

 

They finally pair him with Mercedes, a deceptively demure-looking woman with sun-bronzed skin. Mercedes is self-effacing, quiet, and whip-smart; she reminds him of Dolores in the edge of her smile, her gentle, sarcastic humor, and the way her dark eyes seem ageless. She won’t tell him exactly how or why she joined the Commission, but he gathers that she holds no lost love for her time and place of origin.

 

He cradles her in his arms while she bleeds out in a back alley of Constantinople; the city is falling around them, the Byzantine Empire crashing and burning to an end, and there is blood, blood everywhere, caked on his hands and the knife in his belt, running through the streets and soaking into the fabric of his pants.

 

“Shhh, shhh,” he whispers into her hair, rocking her gently. “I’ve got you.” Her fingers scrabble at his arms, dark eyes pleading, throat gaping open in a horrific smile that even the Commission can’t fix.

 

The average human body contains ten pints of blood, Five knows, and if he had to guess, Mercedes has already lost three pints and is rapidly losing the fourth. The blood continues to bubble sluggishly from the mangled wound across her neck, and he knows that this will take a while, knows what she’s asking him to do.

 

He squeezes her hand even as he reaches for the anachronistic pistol he has tucked behind his back.

 

——————

 

Years later, he sees his mother stitch up an identical wound on his sister, and entirely forgets that he’s half the size of what he usually is, adding his voice to the chorus of his brothers. Upon reflection, he realizes that he’s entirely too small to give the amount of blood that Allison needs.

 

He concludes that he truly does not care, so long as Allison lives.

 

——————

 

After a year of trying to just jump back and hoping that he’d get lucky, he reluctantly concedes that he’s not going to be able to brute-force his way back home, and pivots fully to study his powers from a scientific perspective. He starts breaking into bookstores, ransacking libraries, scavenging the charred husks of college campuses, and grimly sets about teaching himself physics.

 

He picks up the wagon not too long after that — to carry around all the books he’s been collecting, he tells himself, which isn’t wrong, exactly. There’s a finality to this, a defeat he doesn’t want to acknowledge, in dragging around a little kid’s wagon laden with his belongings and supplies and things he’s collected. He can’t help but feel like it’s an admission to the fact that he’s not going to be able to jump home tomorrow, or the day after that. It’s the beginning of a life he doesn’t want to make for himself here.

 

But he’s glad the wagon came along when it did, because that made room for Dolores in his life.

 

——————

 

“Is it just me, or does anyone else see little number Five?” Klaus asks, and Five looks down at his hands, at slender and delicate fingers, uncalloused and too small by half a lifetime.

 

He looks up, and oh, no one told his brother how much eyeshadow was too much, did they, but Five has to admit, it kind of works on him, and why does he need to look up at his brother, he’s a good forty-five years and change older than Number Four, and —

 

Five looks down, notices the overgrown length of his suit, the dangerous sag of the waistline. “Shit.”

 

——————

 

The second person he calls for when he arrives in the apocalyptic future, schoolboy shoes crunching over shards of glass and cement, is —

 

“Ben!”

 

Ben, who was the kindest of them all. Ben, who was always reading and probably the only sibling who could keep up with Five’s lightning-spark intellect. Ben, who could always put aside his own troubles and offer his advice, gentle and steady and reasonable.

 

He never finds Ben’s body, even after hours of digging through the rubble, even after his hands have gone raw and blood-bright from scraping them against the jagged remains of a place he’d called home just that morning.

 

Over a year goes by before he finds out why.

 

——————

 

He doesn’t know if it’s because water is so scarce, or if his body parched from the harsh, post-apocalyptic environment, or if there’s just something wrong with him on a personal, psychological level, but he doesn’t cry for years. He just stares into the fire that he builds every night, Dolores across from him. The flickering of the flames make the shadows dance on her delicately sculpted face, and when he blinks, it looks like she’s giving him a concerned look.

 

“I’ve been too busy to cry,” he says. “Plus, it’s a waste of water. And energy.”

 

Dolores purses her lips.

 

“I don’t need help sleeping at night,” Five says. “It’s not like I have to get up early tomorrow, anyway. There’s nothing left to be late for.”

 

A raised eyebrow.

 

“Look, Dolores, I appreciate the concern, but I’m fine.” Five prods the fire with a long stick before snapping it and throwing it into the fire. “Really, I am.”

 

And he is — he’s shockingly functional; he’s clawed out a daily routine from of the rubble at the the world. He wakes up whenever he wakes up; he takes a swig of water from the large flask he’d picked out of the rubble of a ShopWay, eats a breakfast of whatever will go bad the soonest, and takes up the handle of the wagon and keeps trundling down the cracked concrete road. He hadn’t lingered around the remains of the Umbrella Academy, wandering aimlessly away from the mansion until the streets had looked strange and unfamiliar even despite the destruction; since then, he’s stayed on the move, scavenging the canned foods from supermarkets and warehouses, rifling through cupboards and clearing out pantries. If he stays too long in one place, then he’ll over-forage it, so he moves out and away from the Academy. He likes the idea of being able to come back some day, and if he wants to do that, he can’t exactly leave the place a barren desert.

 

Dolores is still giving him that disapproving look, so Five rolls his eyes. “Fine. Your concerns have been noted and filed. I’m going to go to sleep now, long day tomorrow.” He yanks his blanket over his head and flops over, back to the warmth of the fire.

 

For a moment, the ground seems to drop away from him, falling into a void of endless days and soul-breaking monotony, the drifting of ash and the scorch of sun, and Five absently notices he’s breathing hard, a numbness spreading through his body —

 

 _Good night, Five_. Dolores’ steady voice reaches through the panic and the crackling of flame, and it grounds him. He lets out a long exhale, his racing heart slowing down.

 

“Thanks, Dolores,” he says, and closes his eyes.

 

See? Perfectly fine.

 

——————

 

When the Commission first brings him in, they put him through a training program with the other new recruits, all of them half his age.

 

They all look at him skeptically, the old man with white hair and unkempt beard and slightly manic eyes, but he beats them all resoundingly in every metric — the obstacle course, sharpshooting, discretion, disguise, historical knowledge.

 

Of course he does — he’s had nothing else to do, since the world ended.

 

——————

 

He all but throws the briefcase at the person managing the desk when he arrives back at Commission Headquarters, and stomps away, uncaring of the alarmed looks other Commission employees are casting in his direction. One of them must have alerted the Handler, though, because she shows up in the locker room soon after in a hideously garish pink pantsuit as he’s washing the blood off his hands.

 

“You did well, Five,” she says, and he grunts in response. “Management is talking about giving you a raise.”

 

He yanks his shirt off over his head and stuffs it into the garbage chute, and doesn’t care _at all_ for the way the Handler smiles at him.

 

“You’ll meet your new mission partner—” the Handler begins, and he cuts her off.

 

“No.”

 

“No?” She gives him a look, simultaneously disapproving yet seductive, like she can’t wait for him to act out so that she can crush him under her precariously tall stiletto heels.

 

“No more partners,” he clarifies. “They just slow me down. It’s not worth it.”

 

“Oh?” the Handler says. “But you and Agent de la Cruz worked so well together—”

 

Five slams the door of his locker shut. “I said, no more.” He turns and offers her the coldest, sharpest smile he has in his arsenal. It has blood on the edges of it. “Unless, of course, you want me to drop in the efficiency rankings at Headquarters?”

 

The Handler meets his gaze, matching smile for murderous smile. “Of course not. You’ll get your mission briefing in the next twenty-four hours, Five. Keep up the good work.”

 

——————

 

He’s never doubted that he’ll never make it to retirement. Not because he knows he’s close to cracking the equations for time travel — which is still taking him longer than he expected, but without Dolores, he can’t seem to think as clearly as he used to — but because he’s confident that the Commission merely sends another agent after retirees to ensure that there are no loose ends in the continuum.

 

Five intends to be long gone before that happens.

 

——————

 

After he leaves the city, he travels in widening circles, always keeping the Academy as the center as he moves outwards. It’s a search pattern, he realizes a week in; unconsciously, he’d embarked on a quest to systematically search the remains of the world for —

 

For —

 

— for any sign of another person. He finds bodies, easily — there’s no shortage of glassy-eyed, motionless corpses, so much so that he stops noticing them as he trudges by — but not a single living human being.

 

He examines the destruction of the buildings he passes. It’s hard to figure out what damage came from the apocalyptic event itself and what was a result of the ensuing firestorm afterwards, but there are enough scorch marks in remote places that can only guess that a flash conflagration ran through the entire region, brief and blistering and short-lived, blackening surfaces without totally incinerating things back to a flat ground zero.

 

He tracks the scorch patterns in the pages of a sketchbook he unearths from what used to be a second-story bedroom (indistinguishable from the first floor, but surely no one kept stuffed animals in the kitchen), and after a while, notices the directionality of the burn marks. They all face northeast, like the source of the destruction had come from there, and Five is so excited by this discovery that he breaks from his spiral travel pattern and follows the trail, spatial-jumping a few times just to speed things up.

 

He finds the epicenter of the destruction much sooner than he expects — he jumps straight into emptiness, and falls with a shout, landing off-balance on a crooked piece of debris and tumbling down a slope. He skids a little in the loose scree, backpack slowing him down, until he finally slides to a stop, knees scraped and his ankle throbbing from the impact. As he sits there, nursing his wounds, Five glances around, cataloguing.

 

He’d jumped straight into a deep crater, the lines of it sharp and jagged against the edge of the sky. The chunks of debris lining the outside of the crater look bulkier and broken; as he’d slid down, the dirt turned steadily finer and more powdery, the dust from his disturbance still hanging in the air. He waves a hand to clear it.

 

Something slices across the palm of his hand as he moves, and Five curses, gingerly poking around in the fine sand until he uncovers a piece of glass, decidedly not manmade. It’s a clouded gunmetal gray, a dark shimmer dancing across its surface, now edged with rust red from his bleeding palm. Five glances at it, then toward the center of the crater, where the ground turns a similar color in striated patches, and whistles.

 

So this was how the world ended; not with a whimper, but a bang. Something had hit the earth hard enough to kick off a devastatingly large firestorm and melt dust into glass.

 

“Shit,” Five says, begrudgingly admiring.

 

He jumps back to the edge of the crater and sits on the edge, dangling his legs and tearing up one of his extra shirts to wrap around his palm. There’s a weird kind of poetry to the end of humankind being the same as the end of the dinosaurs, he muses. It didn’t matter how many pyramids or institutions or nations or academies you built if a passing asteroid decided that Earth looked like a good place to land.

 

“You did a shit job of wiping out humanity if you didn’t manage to get me,” Five says. He doesn’t know who he’s challenging, but he’s in a morbidly cheerful mood right now, and it’s not like anyone can hear him anyway.

 

There’s a moment where all the colors around him start to bleed and fuzz, the world turning hypersaturated for a few moments, and Five blinks. Was he seeing things—? Then the saturation vanishes, and he frowns for a moment before shaking his head.

 

“Must be dehydrated,” he mutters to himself, before he sets out to return back to the trail.

 

——————

 

Fifteen years in, he gives up on ever seeing another person, ever hearing another voice.

 

——————

 

During the second year, he spends most of his time learning physics, since reading by firelight is tiring and frankly miserable. He makes himself work through a Graw-McHill high school physics textbook to make sure he hasn’t forgotten the fundamentals, then jettisons it when he finds a good primer on quantum theory. He spends a good month or so working through that text, Dolores offering sly comments and the occasional flash of insight as he reads, and now he raids bookstores and libraries with an eye out for more advanced textbooks to continue his education.

 

At Dolores’ behest, he picks up a biography.

 

“What’s the point in reading about other people’s lives?” he’d asked her sullenly. “This book is a _brick_ , it’s going to take up way too much space in the wagon.”

 

 _It’ll be good for you to broaden your education,_ Dolores responds primly. _Oooh, what about that one?_ Thinking Quick and _— be a dear and move that other book, I can’t see the rest of the title._

 

“No,” Five says. “I put my foot down at pop psychology. We can take _one_ biography.”

 

By the time they leave that particular library, Dolores has talked him into picking up another two slim volumes from the _Very Brief Summation_ series on metaphysics and Scandinavian history. She remains blessedly quiet as he carries her and the books out of the listing doorway, but he can feel the smugness radiating from her saccharine smile.

 

“Don’t say it,” he says to her, warningly, ten days later. He’s finished all three books, barely pausing between setting down one and picking up the next. His quantum theory primer languishes, untouched for the past week.

 

 _What, I told you so?_ Dolores’ smile is a tad wicked at the edges.

 

“Gah, you said it.” Five throws up his hands and flops dramatically backwards against the slanted planks of what used to be a picket fence. He peeks at Dolores, who’s still looking at him.

 

“Stop looking at me like that,” Five complains.

 

_This is my normal face._

 

“Fine, you were right! Other books can be interesting!”

 

Dolores hums indulgently, _Mhmmm…_

 

Five sighs. “And the next time, we can get some novels,” he says in a put-upon tone. When Dolores’ eyes light up, he forestalls her with a hand. “Two. We can pick up two novels.”

 

 _And you’ll read them to me?_ Dolores asks, hopeful.

 

Five smiles. “Of course.”

 

They sit in companionable silence for a while. “But don’t think this means we can slack off on quantum theory,” Five says. “I think we’re making some headway on figuring out the temporal vectors at play.”

 

He’s digging through the toppled shelves of a library, trying to find a book on advanced quantum theory that isn’t written exclusively in technobabble, when his fingers brush away the dust on the front cover of a glossy paperback. He recoils at the familiarity of the face.

 

He unearths it in one heave, precarious piles of books cascading back into chaos.

 

“Extraordinary,” he reads from the front cover.

 

 _Extra ordinary_ , Dolores corrects him softly. _You know her?_

 

“My sister,” Five says, turning the book over. “Oh, Vanya, _no_.”

 

Dolores, ever perceptive, gives him space and leaves him alone as he stumbles, dazed, out of the library. He sits down heavily, cracking the spine open and paging through the title page, the publisher’s information, with shaking fingers.

 

He reads the first sentence of the book — _My name is Vanya Hargreeves, and you’ve probably never heard of me_ — and has to put it down, blinking furiously. He hears it in her voice, familiar and foreign all at once, the yawning chasm of the seventeen years he’d blazed through with impunity reaching up to swallow him whole.

 

“No, stop that,” he admonishes himself, and opens the book back up again.

 

He devours Vanya’s book hungrily, reaching through the words for the times with his siblings he’s lost. He wants to reach through the pages and shake Luther until some sense rattles back into his brother’s thick skull. He wants to go to one of Allison’s movie premieres and laugh about the terrible plot inconsistencies with her at the afterparty. He wants to smack Diego upside the head and tell him to get a real job. He wants to sit Klaus down and have a good, long conversation with him.

 

He wants to give Vanya a hug, and tell her that her ordinariness never stopped her from being his favorite sibling.

 

He wants to visit Ben’s grave.

 

Vanya never describes the details of Ben’s death in her book, just that it was horrible, violent, and tragic, and even later, after he makes it back, after forty-five years of not-knowing, Five can’t bring himself to ask.

 

“Was it bad?” he says, under the smug, all-knowing gaze of a portrait of his younger self, and he knows that Vanya understands what he’s asking, that she’s seen them come back from missions covered in blood, grimly quiet, that she’s patiently helped clean their wounds and stitched them up, a dark-haired ghost at Mom’s side — she knows the shit their family sees, their family’s seen through.

 

“Yes,” Vanya says, and Five feels that stab of pain, that stab of loss, that even though he fought tooth and nail through time and space to get back to his family, he’s too late, and it’s already broken.

 

——————

 

“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck from time,” Five reads aloud, and puts the book down in his lap. “Really, Dolores?”

 

 _Kurt Vonnegut is a genius and this is one of my favorite books. Keep reading_.

 

“You say that about every book,” Five complains, but does.

 

——————

 

The Commission sends him to poison Vonnegut’s comrade, and after he does so, Five huddles next to Vonnegut in a deep cellar, listening to the resounding booms of the Allies firebombing Dresden from overhead. He resists the urge to shake Vonnegut’s hand and say, “My friend is a great fan of your future work,” and instead, slips quietly into a discreet hallway and time-jumps out of there with his briefcase as quickly as he can.

 

——————

 

He learns to jump-start a car from a manual, and manages to crash it into no fewer than three houses before its engines whine warningly, and Five decides to book it out of there before it explodes.

 

 _You’re a right terror on the streets_ , Delores remarks, and just to spite that comment, Five learns traffic laws from the battered pages of a driver’s ed manual, mockingly obeys every stop sign he sees in the middle of podunk-nowhere until Dolores finally caves and tells him to just floor it.

 

“With pleasure,” Five says, and floors it.

 

——————

 

He spends a week sneaking out of the campsite while Dolores isn’t looking, and drives cars over the edge of a ravine, spatial-jumping back to the top right before he hits the ground.

 

There’s something about the moment in free-fall, that suspension between the solid reality of the past he’d careened off of and the inevitable certainty of the future rushing towards him, that sets him free, clears his mind as all of his senses catapult past eleven and he calculates the distance he has left to the ground, converts it to seconds, and he twists in his seat —

 

— to tumble and land at the top of the ravine again, hearing the echoing shrieks of tortured metal as the car bends and breaks against the rocks. Then a soft intake of air and a _poomf_! of combustion as the engine goes up in flames. Five flops back against the ground and gazes up at the sky, which is just beginning to remember the color blue, and breathes hard for a minute before he realizes he’s laughing.

 

Dolores catches him eventually, and Five just shrugs. “I’m nineteen, I have to get all of my teenaged rebellion done now,” he says with his best innocent smile. “Plus, I got the idea from a book I read.”

 

Dolores sighs. _I did this, didn’t I._

 

Five’s grin grows wider. “Yep, you did.”

 

——————

 

“I’d kill a man for a doughnut,” Five says, standing in front of a bakery. All that’s left of the sign is “DY’S D UGH TS,” but he knows the place, the leather seats in the booths, the big signs and geometric lines. It’s a place enshrined and canonized in some distant childhood memory.

 

 _What I wouldn’t give for a good cuppa,_ Dolores sighs as they pick their way up to the askew door, hinges long broken and glass panes shattered.

 

“Well, let’s see what we can find,” Five says.

 

They find an entire pantry of coffee beans, vacuum-sealed and stored neatly in a high cabinet, and Five devotes the next few months to perfecting the art of post-apocalypse espresso. He has the time to spare.

 

——————

 

He can barely bring himself to meet the concerned looks of his siblings, gathered around the kitchen table. He avoids their questioning looks by making himself a sandwich, reveling in the strange, fluttering joy of moving about in a space his body instinctively knows to navigate. Mom still stores the peanut butter in the same cabinet, forty-five (or seventeen, whatever) years, later.

 

“Nice dress,” he says to Klaus, which takes them both by surprise.

 

——————

 

The third person he calls for when he arrives in the apocalyptic future, falling to his knees before the broken and twisted gate, is —

 

“Dad!”

 

He was wrong, he realizes it now, so terribly _wrong_ about being ready to time-travel, and though he hates the old man’s aloofness and holier-than-thou attitude, resents the old man for the way Hargreeves breaks his siblings’ spirits and cows them with his monocled disapproval, now the dawning horror is creeping up Five’s ribcage and chest and reaching for his throat, of knowing that _he fucked up_ , and he _fucked up so badly_ , that he’s trapped himself in this future and he can’t get back —

 

“Anyone!” He doesn’t care anymore, doesn’t care if it brings big dumb Luther with his bossiness and insecurities, if it brings Diego with his sharp tongue and sharper blades, if it brings Allison, who he’s always been wary of because she can make him do anything if she wants too, if it brings Klaus, who’s just kind of sad and kind of crazy and no fun to be around — he doesn’t care anymore, because all he hears is the belching of hot, fire-driven gusts in his ears, the bleak scrape of gravel along cement, and beyond it all, the echoing vastness of being completely, totally, alone.

 

He doesn’t know how long he just sits on his heels, head bowed, watching the dust drift by and listening to the crackle of the fire gnaw savagely through the supporting timbers of houses, the occasional groan and crash of buildings collapsing into the dirt. He wonders how long he can sit there before he collapses too.

 

It might have been few minutes. It might have been a few hours. The colorless, haze-covered sky hardly changes.

 

The realization hits him hard enough that he lifts his head to look up at the gaping emptiness of the home he’d only just left.

 

“I never got to say goodbye,” he whispers.

 

—————

 

Quantum theory is promising, but limited. He closes the cover of Sakura’s _Advanced Quantum Mechanisms_ and just fumes — the last three books on quantum theory he’d read had all ended before they actually came to any conclusions about the physics of time, which was the only reason why Five was suffering through their pretentious academic bullshit anyway.

 

He throws the book into the fire in a fit of pique.

 

 _Five_ , Dolores says, disapproving.

 

“What? It’s not like it has anything better to contribute,” Five says.

 

 _I know,_ and Dolores’ tone is patient but reasonable, _but what if you need that book again?_

 

“Then I’ll find another copy,” Five says. “Or I’ll just re-derive the equations, it’s not like Sakura got much farther than Cheng, and her books are in every college bookstore we’ve been to.”

 

Dolores eventually coaxes him out of his frustration, and they start mapping out the equations for his spatial jumps together. Five tests the limits of his abilities — he can hit up to ten jumps in five minutes, though his ability to jump declines precipitously when he gets tired out — catalogues the few seconds that elapse between entering a portal and exiting another. The way he spatial-jumps, he explains to Dolores, is by hopping into an alternate dimension for a few moments, and then hopping back into reality at a new time and place of his choosing.

 

 _What happens if you try and stay in that dimension?_ Dolores asks.

 

Five frowns, then tries it. He blinks out of apocalypse afternoon into a black void, and instead of immediately elbowing his way out of the interdimensional space again, lingers for a moment. For the first time, he notices the glimmering of light in the darkness around him, like pinpricks of starlight.

 

From the side, he senses an onrushing wind, feels more than sees a colossal wave of shadow that blocks out the stars, and he thinks he hears a slithering sound that seems oddly familiar when —

 

— he’s unceremoniously ejected from the in-between space, and lands on his elbows and knees, gravel jabbing at exposed skin.

 

He’s swearing a blue streak when he stands up and sees Dolores’ back, and narrows his eyes; the sun is considerably higher in the sky than when he’d left, the fire that had been crackling now a pile of cold ash. There’s a fine layer of dust on Dolores’ blouse.

 

 _Well_? Dolores asks. _I’ve been waiting._

 

Five traces a finger through the dust and rubs it between index finger and thumb. “How long have you been waiting? How long was I gone?”

 

_A day or so, and it was dreadfully boring. Well? What did you see? The science, Five!_

 

Something in her tone reminds him of his father, and he flinches a little before shrugging it off. Reginald Hargreeves was long dead, and this was _Dolores_.

 

“It was dark, everywhere,” Five says slowly. “Except there were stars, but they were really far away. And… and I wasn’t alone.” He thinks about the slithering, about the feeling that someone or something was approaching him, and how strange that it hadn’t seemed threatening, but rather, familiar.

 

 _Of course you would teleport through the interdimensional homes of eldritch abominations,_ Dolores says, amused, and it hits him then.

 

“Oh! I’ve been moving through the same space where _Ben_ got his powers!” and that should definitely make him more scared than he is, that he’s zipping in and out of the territory of a tentacled monster that he _knows_ is terrifying, has seen in action, but he can’t be bothered to think about _consequences_ when he’s high on the giddiness of the breakthrough.

 

 _The equations_ , Dolores reminds him, but there’s a smile in her voice.

 

“Yes, yes, of course,” Five says, and pulls out Vanya’s book; he’s been keeping notes in the blank back pages, the empty spaces between lines, and crosses out his previous equations and rewrites a new one with a flourish, adding in a vector for transdimensional movement —

 

He stop shorts, and frowns. “Dolores,” he says. “That just made it _more_ complicated.”

 

 _Suck it up, big boy_ , she says. _You’re all that we’ve got left of the scientific frontier._

 

——————

 

Puberty is a trip and a half when it hits him — a little later than usual, a textbook informs him, but he chalks that up to apocalypse-induced malnutrition.

 

Dolores laughs, and laughs, and laughs, and laughs, and when Five tells her to stop laughing, she instead requests a series of thoroughly terrible young adult novels for Five to read to her the next time they stop at a public library. The books are so bad, the characters so tasteless, the plots so illogical that Five decides that maybe going through puberty in the apocalypse isn’t the worst thing that can happen after all.

 

——————

 

The equations only get more complicated, and space in Vanya’s book steadily dwindles, so that Five takes to repurposing any flat surface he can find — half-broken walls, shapely debris, any plazas that he finds mostly intact — to scrawl calculations on with powdery, jagged stones. His lines are crooked and his equations and variables look like the product of a deranged chicken explaining a conspiracy theory with chalk, but he chips away at deriving the set of parameters that can explain the sheer impossibility of his spatial jumps while Dolores heckles him from the wagon. It takes him seven years, three additional plazas in neighboring cities, and a stretch of miraculously unbroken highway before he figures it out. He’s plugging in data points and checking the equations by rote, scratching idly at a few days worth of scruff on his chin and throat, when he reaches the end and it all checks out. He pauses, at a sudden loss for what to do next, and then it hits him.

 

“Dolores!” he yells. “Dolores, come quick, I’ve figured it out!” and he catches her up in his arms and swings her around, childlike and giddy.

 

 _Took you long enough,_ she says, teasing.

 

“Oh yeah, fat lot of help you were,” Five says.

 

_Excuse you, how many dropped variables did I point out to you?_

 

“Fine, fine,” Five says, and they slow to a stop, just grinning wildly at each other.

 

He hesitates for a moment, then pulls her into a tight hug. “Thank you, Dolores,” he whispers in her ear. “I couldn’t have done this without you.”

 

 _Of course, Five_ , and he hears the warmth in her voice even if he doesn’t feel it in her arms.

 

——————

 

As difficult as it was to theorize the quantum mechanics of spatial teleportation, time travel is worse, Five discovers.

 

Much, much worse.

 

——————

 

He forgets, sometimes, why he’s trying so hard, why the equations matter, why he doesn’t just take the rifle he found two cities back and just —

 

 _Five_ , Dolores says, and he remembers.

 

——————

 

He’s stopping by Commission Headquarters after his second removal mission, when he finds the equation room.

 

He’s looking for weapons storage, which, to be fair, takes up the rest of the floor, except he managed to walk into the one meeting room that isn’t crammed to the rafters with period-appropriate weaponry. Instead, the room is bare, and the walls are covered with long lines of tiny numbers and characters. He leans in close to read them, and recoils. He _recognizes_ those equations —

 

“Impressive, isn’t it?” and it takes all of Five’s well-honed discipline not to jump at the Handler’s voice. “There’s a little subset of research and development devoted solely to figuring out how you time travel. Management approved the project because they think it’ll help us make our briefcase technology more efficient.”

 

Five spots a photo tacked to the wall: it’s a grainy, overhead shot, of a broken plaza ringed by the jagged remains of collapsed buildings, the large cement squares covered in messily-scrawled chalk equations. “That’s my work,” he says.

 

The Handler leans against the doorway, every line of her body languid and predatory. “Like I said — we’ve had our eye on you for quite some time, Five.”

 

——————

 

The next time he heads down to weapons storage to pick up a Roman dagger — apparently Julius Caesar hadn’t been stabbed enough, or stabbed yet at all — the door to the equation room is locked, and Five swallows his frustration.

 

He’d never expected to get help in figuring out the equations for time travel, anyway.

 

——————

 

If he can just travel back to right before the apocalypse, Five reasons, gazing up one night at the stars that are just starting to reappear through the haze, he can talk to his siblings, and if they pool the full force of the Umbrella Academy, surely they could come together to prevent the end of the world. And if the world never ended, then he’d never be trapped here, solitary in a desolate landscape, gazing at a bleak horizon, and terribly, desperately lonely.

 

 _I’m not sure that’s how time travel works_ , Dolores says, apologetic. _That directly violates the Grandfather Paradox—_

 

“God _dammit,_ Dolores, just let me have this, will you?” Five hisses, and she does, she backs off, and never brings it up again.

 

——————

 

Even though Dolores had urged him to go with the Handler when she’d turned up at their campsite, all but shoved him in the direction of the Handler’s outstretched hand and wide, deceptive smile, Five still feels guilt for abandoning her after the end of the world. At least they’d had each other, all those years — now Dolores has no one, and her voice haunts him sometimes, when he’s lying alone in the dark of some anonymous motel, when he can’t sleep.

 

——————

 

 _The equations look off_ , Dolores tells him, _and you’ve had too much Bordeaux_.

 

“Which one caused the other?” Five asks lazily. He doesn’t know what Dolores is talking about; he hasn’t felt this loose-limbed and careless in _years_.

 

Dolores is right on both counts, of course. Dolores is always right.

 

——————

 

Dolores’ department store is a solid two-hour drive away from the mansion, but when Five realizes that even Vanya doesn’t quite believe him, he slips out of her apartment and makes the trip anyway, eight day deadline be damned.

 

He stands in the darkness, gazing up at Dolores — she looks better than ever, clothes still stiff and new, a luxurious wig tumbling past her shoulders.

 

He’s almost afraid to speak to her — it’s been years since he left her behind, and he’s not even sure she remembers him, what with the apocalypse still in the future and all — but then she smiles at him, and he knows that smile, knows that she remembers everything, timelines be damned.

 

“It’s good to see you, Dolores,” Five says, and then the bullets rip through her midsection.

 

——————

 

He came back to save his siblings from the apocalypse, but as Luther holds Dolores by the throat outside the window, Five aims a rifle at him and swears to god, sometimes he can’t remember why.

 

——————

 

For a moment, he just stares at the fire extinguisher that bounces to rest at his feet. It’s bright and sleek and red, and thoroughly incongruous in the back yard he’s snuck into, and he looks back up at the lightning storm of blue energy tearing open the fabric of the time-space continuum in the middle of Dallas. He sees the faces of his siblings on the other side, rippling like he’s looking at them through a curtain of water, and they look apprehensive, concerned, tense.

 

More importantly, they look alive.

 

He takes a deep breath and wades in, rifle forgotten against the picket fence behind him, fighting against the gale-force temporal winds. He has to screw his eyes shut as the temporal dimension tries to shove him back into the 60’s, but just as the first flicker of doubt licks at the back of his mind, there’s a sudden flood of strength in his bones.

 

He’s waited a lifetime for this, and nothing as petty as physics being _upset_ that he figured out how to break its rules is going to stop him.

 

Five was coming home.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> so I really need to write my thesis and finish my other WIP, but I can’t concentrate on either until I get this off my chest
> 
> I made the mistake of thinking about Five after I marathoned TUA in the course of 36 hours, and realized: Five’s fatal flaw, as presented in TUA, is that of pride — he refuses to rely on his siblings, belittles them continuously, and is generally the little asshole we all love and cherish. But for him to get to that place of “I’m forty-five years older and know everything better than you,” he has to go through years and years and years of confronting the fact that he doesn’t know better, that his own pride and bullheadedness tore him away from his siblings and eventually resulted in their deaths. Unsurprisingly, this also leads him to the conclusion that he’s the only one who can save them (and the world), and just continuously vanishes without telling anyone where he’s going.
> 
> And so in the last episode, when they still cause the apocalypse and everything still falls apart despite a literal lifetime of Five’s best efforts and continual sacrifices and deals with the devil, that he had one goal in his life and he still failed at it —
> 
> Well. Let’s just say I have a lot of feelings about Five Hargreeves.


End file.
